Robo and Bobo were of course the breakout characters of Top notch Detective comics and the first of the new science heroes to make it really bis after the collapse of the Comics Code. With a prime time TV show from 1965 to 1967, Robo and BoBo were riding high in the comics until the age of Irrelevancy began in the early 1970's. After that the Dyslexic Duo seemed old fashioned and a bit corny in the face of the Far Out Generation. It wasn't until the early Eighties when Manley S! Melmon moved out to LA after the death of his girlfriend Sally Tane, that he re-imagined the characters as a pair of sociopathic punk rock science heroes on the mean streets of Los Angeles during the birth of the American hardcore punk rock music scene!
Melmon was no stranger to punk rock and had been hanging out at CBGB's in New York since before the Ramones even began practicing. LA punk was a bold new breed of the genere and seemed to translate well into comics! There weren't a hell of a lot of Punks around the country outside of LA, and for some unknown reason Washington D.C. but one thing was for sure..... They All Read Skidmore comics! Robo and BoBo became the unofficial mascots of the early punk rock movement and will be forever be associated with this particularly ugly time in music history!
It was also a new innovation in comics by Melmon, the world's first sideways comics! It never took off though. the comics got lost in the spinner racks and the tiny print ruined everybody's eyeballs. To this day collectors curse Melmon, Robo and BoBo and even Skidmore comics for their myopic vision and the commercialization of the punk rock movement in general. Within half a year nearly half of the Skidmore Science Heroes would be sporting Mohawk hair cuts and wearing Leather jackets.
After about 1983 when the scene had died away, no one had a steady job and they had no place to stay. Robo and BoBo were cancelled just before the Skidmore Implosion would occur and the company would close it's doors forever. Ownership of Robo and BoBo would be claimed by breakfast cereal giant Quaker Otis and optioned off to Hollywood where in 1989 a new 'Goth' BoBo would hit the movie screens for a series of progressively dismal movies that verged on the ridiculous toward the end.
Today the old 1980's Robo and Bobo comics are commanding a small fortune, as they were mostly kept around squats and punk rock houses and got beer spilled all over them and had Hitler mustaches drawn all over the covers and were generally mishandled and bent out of shape by non comic book readers who thought it might be cool to read a comic book in the middle of a basement show or keg party or something. Finding a NM (near mint) copy is next to impossible. trust me. Here now are a few select covers of the infamous series that still ring true for the kepers of the flame of true punk rock. All twelve of them!
Sadly just as the Skidmore comics was about to implode on itself, Bobo was awarded his own series. It only saw one issue before the walls came crumbling down and has the unique distinction of being the last original comic book to be published by Skidmore before going into the All Classic Reprint comic that would be the beginning of the end for the comic book giant. Quaker Otis wisely converted the comic into a crappy newspaper strip that ran in many community newsletters and even penny saver ad zines that were popular with cheapskates of the early Eighties. The popularity of Bobo rose once more and became one of the most heavily bootleged T-Shirts of the time!
The movies, the newspaper strips and the bootleg T-Shirts meant little to the comic collectors of the day, what they wanted was more Robo and Bobo comics. But that was just not to be. Somehow they found out that you just couldn't exploit comicbooks the way you could with science hero bricabrac and gee-gaws, which seemed to fly off the shelves. Even if people had never seen the comics. It was a marketing strategy that worked for Quaker Otis and his crew of trend setters! To this day you will occasionally find a Bobo prize inside your breakfast cereal or a commemorative jelly jar glass of Robo stuck all the way on the back of the shelf in your local supermarket, courtesy of the money grabbers at Quaker Otis. As of this writing America is eagerly awaiting the release of the Bobo meets Gooberman Movie which is due to hit the screen for the Christmas shoping season and it is expected to be one of the most exploited charters in action figure history. With several hundred variant versions and slightly different and totally worthless packaging plans going in to effect as we speak, thanks to someone at Quaker Otis who found an old copy of Skidmore's "Crisis of Infinite Births" comics.
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